AMD Appoints Ex-Intel Veteran as Server Chief Technology Officer

Advanced Micro Devices said on Monday that it had appointed Donald Newell as vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) of its server business unit. Donald Newell will help defining AMD server product roadmap and will report to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD products group.

“Don Newell brings a strong combination of leadership skills, engineering and design expertise, and strategic direction. We are fortunate to have Don on board as we prepare for the delivery of the 'Bulldozer' core in our AMD Opteron processors, scheduled for launch in 2011," said Mr. Bergman.

As AMD server CTO, Mr. Newell is responsible for the concept and definition of AMD’s long-term server roadmap based on current conditions, expected demand and long-term server trends. He is leading multiple worldwide teams and working alongside other AMD design and development teams to ensure successful transition of programs from design to market availability.

During his 16 years with Intel, Newell led development of both SoC and server platform architecture innovations for areas ranging from cloud computing to hand-held devices. Newell also initiated and drove the I/O acceleration technologies (IOAT) from initial research to product intercept, developed a detailed architecture for heterogeneous computing and was responsible for delivering the PC industry’s first digital TV receiver. He led his team to publish seminal papers on areas such as cache QoS and network protocol processing. Mr. Newell has been published in more than 60 peer-reviewed research journals and publications and is a co-author of the IETF RFC2429 that specifies how video is transported over the Internet. Prior to joining Intel, he was a software engineer for first Datanex Software and later Sequent Computers. Newell received a Bachelors of Science from the University of Oregon.

A distinguished engineer with more than 20 patents filed, Newell previously served as a senior principle engineer leading the System-on-Chip (SoC) and datacenter networking architecture groups within Intel Labs before joining AMD.